Traumatic Brain Injury? There’s An App for That

Smart phones are all the rage in military circles: The Army is currently experimenting with soldier-friendly iPhones and Android devices, and in the not-too-distant future, troops may tap “combat apps” to do everything from watching a drone video to taking pictures at a checkpoint.

Now the Pentagon wants smart phone applications for a different fight: the battle against traumatic brain injury. The Department of Defense announced Tuesday it had released a new mobile phone app for helping identify mild traumatic brain injury, medical-speak for a concussion. It can be downloaded, for free, on an Android phone.

Sounds amusing, but it’s a deadly serious business for the department.

Traumatic brain injury is one of the hidden wounds of war. And the military, faced with a deadly roadside bomb threat in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been trying to get a grip on the problem. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff, has said the service needs to do a better job of diagnosing invisible blast injuries.

“When a soldier comes back from war, he might look exactly the same and act the same, but after two weeks or so, the signs start to show up,” Gen. Chiarelli said in a recent breakfast with reporters. “He goes to the doctor and says ‘fix it,’ and the doctor can’t fix it. It’s got to be the most frustrating thing in the world.”

Still, the military is a long way from developing an app that can automatically detect traumatic brain injury. This new application, developed by the National Center for Telehealth and Technology, is basically a digital reference tool for health care practitioners.

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